Giuliani Offers Plan To Curb Guns

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Published: March 8, 1994

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani announced yesterday that the police would place new emphasis on reducing the number of illegal guns in New York City streets by investigating gunrunners with more detectives and better computers.

At the core of Mr. Giuliani's strategy, detectives have been ordered to apply the same kind of effort to investigating illegal guns as they do to organized crime and narcotics. For the first time, the police will question every person arrested with a gun to find out where the gun was obtained and from whom. That information will be transferred to Federal authorities to arrest traffickers who run guns from the plains of Georgia and Texas to the youth gangs of the South Bronx.

Mr. Giuliani ran successfully on the promise he would reduce violent crime, and his decision to announce his gun strategy surrounded by 4,000 seized weapons and Federal law-enforcement officials underscored the political importance he placed on his announcement.

He acknowledged that the city has limited powers to impede the influx of tens of thousands of guns that enter the city every year through the complex trafficking network that crosses state and international borders, and that his strategy was just a beginning. But his announcement seemed to be an effort by a Republican mayor to focus attention on gun control strategies that have largely been blocked in Washington by Senate Republicans. 'Epidemic of Guns'

"We need Federal help, but we need to be doing a lot more internally to get guns off the streets," Mr. Giuliani said at Police Headquarters. Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, added: "We will do our part, but the solution of this issue lies in Washington. This city is dealing with an epidemic of guns."

Of an estimated 2,000 homicides committed in the city last year, three-quarters were committed with handguns. The police received 74,376 complaints of gun firings last year, up from 27,811 in 1986. There are up to two million handguns in city, the vast majority of which are not registered.

No new city financing will go into the gun control effort. Mr. Giuliani is counting on Albany to provide $600,000 for computers to trace spent bullets and casings that will link criminals, especially serial murderers, to multiple crimes and strengthen the hands of prosecutors who take them to court.

One of the state-of-the-art computers Mr. Giuliani wants to order is the Bullet Proof, a computerized imaging analysis that compares bullets recovered from victims and crime scenes. Another, the Drug Fire, is a computerized camera that takes microscopic pictures of the firing pin impressions of discharged shells.

The Police Department will immediately deploy the 90-officer Street Crime Unit, an elite undercover investigative force, to the most gun-infested neighborhoods of the city to hunt illegal traffickers and enlist informants. Those neighborhoods have been identified as the East New York section of Brooklyn, the High Bridge section of the Bronx and Washington Heights in Manhattan.

Police officials said resources diverted from other crime-fighting efforts would be more than made up by the leads and evidence developed by investigating guns.

There will also be a reorganization of the Firearms Task Force, an agency staffed by the Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that tracks illegal, across-state gun transactions. The police will assign six more detectives to a force that already includes 18 detectives. And more than a dozen of those detectives will be deputized as United States marshals so they can take their investigations out of state and employ Federal wiretaps.

The fanfare that accompanied the announcement yesterday merged the symbolism of confiscated guns with a highly public reading of the riot act by Commissioner Bratton to some of his top officers. With reporters present, Commissioner Bratton and his top aides lectured the captains of the 75 police precincts, telling tell them that if they did not treat guns as high a priority as drugs and organized crime he would find commanders who would.

Acknowledging that the Police Department had not followed through with similar anti-gun strategies in the past, Commissioner Bratton nodded at the 4,000 guns on the podium and said, "This is the heart and soul of what we have to get serious about."

Mr. Giuliani stopped just short of explicitly criticizing Republican members of Congress who last year filibustered the Brady Law that mandates a nationwide waiting period for the purchase of handguns, and now oppose President Clinton's proposal to license handgun owners.

But when asked whether the Republican lawmakers should support such measures, he told reporters, "I believe it is very necessary." He pointedly reminisced about his White House visit with President Clinton in December, in which he endorsed the Administration proposal for national gun licensing, and added that his proposals today were meant "to start developing the interest in national and international regulation of guns."

Democratic lawmakers praised the Mayor's push for gun control. "It would be great if Mayor Giuliani could become the point Republican pushing comprehensive gun control legislation," said Representative Charles E. Schumer, the Brooklyn Democrat who is the leading proponent of handgun control in the House of Representatives. "Today he took a step in that direction."

Richard M. Aborn, president of Handgun Control Inc., a national advocacy group, also supported the Mayor's efforts. "This is in line with our thinking that gun control must be a bipartisan issue," he said. "We welcome the Mayor's support for licensing and registration."

Photo: Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani spoke with Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, left, and Zachary W. Carter, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, after announcing a plan to increase the investigation of gunrunners. (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)